Set in Austin, Texas—the capitol of the newly minted Lone Star state— The Midnight Assassin recounts a series of eight ghastly murders that were committed during the years 1884 and 1885. More like annihilations, these butcheries incited panic and paranoia in this frontier town of 17,000 people, and undermined municipal efforts to make Austin a mecca of prosperity and modernism.

The killer was never caught, although tantalizing clues point to several potential suspects. Some observers believe that the killer fled Texas, traveled to London, and recreated himself into the legendary Whitechapel killer famously known as “Jack the Ripper.”

Prof. Gershman mentions a PBS TV documentary that identified the killer as 19-year old Nathan Elgin, who was allegedly apprehended at a crime scene, whose involvement was supported by additional circumstantial evidence, and after whose death these killings stopped. Yet, Hollandsworth discounts this possibility in his book leaving readers with a well-written dramatic story of one of the oldest (and almost forgotten) murder mysteries in the history of America.

As lohud.com reports, a select group of Pace students (Luis Rosario Rodriguez, Ryan Koleda, Maria Ouzlian, Jonathan Campozano, Amy O’Donohue, Karine P. Patino) along with Miguel Sanchez-Robles, Rebecca Merton, and professors Vanessa Merton, Thomas M. McDonnell, and Vikki Rogers, spent their ‘2016 spring break’ in Dilley, Texas assisting the CARA Family Detention Pro Bono Project by offering legal assistance to women and children apprehended by ICE who are seeking asylum status in the United States. This was an intense and intimate lawyering experience for the students in the Pace Immigration Justice Clinic, lead by Prof. Merton, who worked closely with detained Central American children and mothers in the country’s largest family immigration detention center. Not only were the students able to work with the incredibly intricate and arcane immigration asylum law – many of these women and children face physical danger or death in their native countries – but they did so in a context that, as one of the students reported, required them to gain sufficient trust to make the representation effective. As result of their efforts, more than 90 women and children were released to join family members already residing in the United States.

thousands of cases are being reviewed for testimony about DNA odds that may have been given using outdated guidelines that inflated the likelihood a defendant had touched a murder weapon or another piece of evidence.

Developments in DNA technology had revolutionized the use of DNA evidence in criminal trials and had played a major role in the efforts to uncover wrongful convictions.

Although those involved in innocence litigation know that Texas has a very bad record in wrongful convictions, particularly based on DNA, in the words of Barry Scheck (a co-founder of the Innocence Project), “Texas is the only place that’s systematically trying to correct it.”

In case you didn’t have a chance to read this when it first came out, we bring to you another post by Professor Bennett L. Gershman, titled On the Death of Raynette Turner.

Prof. Gershman introduces his piece by saying,

The fifth death of a woman of color in US police custody in July. An unspeakable tragedy by itself, but arguably symbolic of the legal profession’s failure to examine the factual and logical foundation for our system of modern policing and mass incarceration.

The prosecutor in the Michael Morton case in Texas, in which the defendant was exonerated, has pled guilty to criminal contempt for intentional non-disclosure of exculpatory evidence and will give up his law license, perform 500 hours of community service, and serve 10 days in jail. Among the withheld evidence was the account of an eyewitness, the defendant’s son, who said he was not the murderer.

No matter what one’s views are on this unprecedented event, it should raise consciousness about the risk of withholding substantial exculpatory evidence and risking the conviction of an innocent person.